Jeremy Garrett is a master of deploying multiple instruments and modern technology to create a staggering variety of sounds on his solo work — his January Organic Records debut project, Circles, more than proved the point — but for his new single, the mountain-dwelling fiddler and vocalist for the Infamous Stringdusters keeps it bare bones simple. Written with frequent collaborator Jon Weisberger, “The World Keeps Turning Around” is a meditation on social media and human communication that needs nothing more than a guitar, a voice and the tiniest bit of multi-tracking alchemy to deliver a message that’s perfectly suited to the moment.
“These days it just seems like we are going around in circles with many of the conversations we are having — especially online,” Garrett observes. “Someone has a good idea for good change, and then the barrage of disagreements on how to achieve that fires up. When we look at the big picture though, are we all just beating our heads against a brick wall, so to speak? Never realizing how powerful all of us truly loving one another could be? Maybe that message is too simple and naive, but perhaps we need to break it all down, go back to the basics and realize that we are one country, one world. We can’t ever escape that, and when we learn from each other, we would never want to.”
“So the goal of this song for us,” he continues, “was to simply ask that question: are we going to keep heading down a path of division over and over and over again? Or can we ask ourselves what we can do to break this cycle?”
Yet timely as the song’s theme is, its simple instrumentation links it back to older, simpler kinds of music — an impression underlined by the song’s use of an ancient “additive” approach to its central lyric components, in which each verse introduces a new question or statement that is followed by a repeat of the previous verses’ lines. The blend of modern and traditional folk elements has been a hallmark of Garrett’s writing for years, but not always given the prominence it has here — and it’s that characteristic mix, applied to a topic that’s at once wholly novel and yet quintessentially timeless, that puts “The World Keeps Turning Around” in a musical class all its own.
Listen to “The World Keeps Turning Around” HERE.
